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Document 16 · Cobalt Horizon Group

CHG Platform Architecture

FoundationalActive

CHG-PLATFORM-ARCHITECTURE.md — Cobalt Horizon Group Platform Architecture

Status: Foundational — governs every CHG-SPEC document, and sits above LS-PLATFORM-ARCHITECTURE.md in the ownership hierarchy Relationship to LS-PLATFORM-ARCHITECTURE.md: That document remains correct and in force for everything scoped to Legend Studios specifically (multi-game concerns). This document adds the tier above it: Legend Studios is itself one of several Cobalt Horizon Group companies, not the top of the hierarchy.

1. Architectural Principle

The Cobalt Horizon Group Platform is independent of any single company, the same way the Legend Studios Platform is independent of any single game.

The hierarchy is now three tiers, not two:

Cobalt Horizon Group Platform (CHG-SPEC series)
        ↓
Legend Studios Platform (LS-SPEC series)   PipeDesk   SkyLinkStarLink   Keystone Acquisitions Group   Samson Grind Coffee   Future CHG companies
        ↓
Diamond Legend   Gridiron Legend   Bitcoin Speedway   (DL-SPEC series and future game-specific series)

Legend Studios does not disappear or flatten into Cobalt Horizon Group — it remains the owner of everything genuinely specific to running a game studio (DL-SPEC series' multiplayer, simulation, rosters; the LS-SPEC series' any Legend-Studios-only concerns, if any remain after §3). It becomes, itself, a consumer of the Cobalt Horizon Group Platform, exactly as Diamond Legend is a consumer of the Legend Studios Platform. The same non-negotiable rule from LS-PLATFORM-ARCHITECTURE.md §1 applies one level up: the platform is not the center. The company at the top of this diagram is infrastructure, not the star.

2. Why This Tier Exists

Affiliate/ambassador/creator/referral/commission management, marketing asset distribution, fraud detection, and program analytics are not gaming concerns — they are business-development concerns any Cobalt Horizon Group company needs, regardless of whether that company makes games, runs a SaaS product, operates telecom infrastructure, manages acquisitions, or sells coffee. Building this once at the CHG tier and letting every company consume it is the direct extension of the reasoning that produced LS-SPEC-001 in the first place, applied one level higher because the actual scope of reuse turned out to be broader than "games."

3. Consequence for LS-SPEC-001

LS-SPEC-001 (Ambassador & Community Platform) was correctly designed for its scope at the time it was written. Almost everything it owns — ambassador accounts, referral tracking, the reward engine, campaigns, marketing assets, training, communications, fraud detection — is not actually gaming-specific; it was scoped to Legend Studios only because no broader tier existed yet. Per CHG-SPEC-001, that ownership moves up a tier.

What plausibly remains legitimately Legend-Studios-specific (not decided by this document, flagged for the next LS-SPEC-001 revision): beta-tester tracking tied to game builds, and any Legend-Studios-only community mechanics that don't generalize to a coffee company or a telecom business. See LS-SPEC-001's own updated header for the current status of this narrowing.

4. Brand Adapter — The CHG-Tier Equivalent of the Game Adapter

Every CHG company (including Legend Studios, on behalf of all its games) integrates through a Brand Adapter — the same integration discipline as LS-PLATFORM-ARCHITECTURE.md §4's Game Adapter, one tier up, with brand-agnostic responsibilities (authenticate the user, report conversions, read entitlements) rather than gaming-specific language. A brand adapter must never duplicate CHG-SPEC-001's logic, for the same reason a game adapter must never duplicate LS-SPEC-001/002/003/004's logic.

5. Service Boundaries

Unchanged in spirit from LS-PLATFORM-ARCHITECTURE.md §5, restated one tier up: communication between a CHG company and the Cobalt Horizon Group Platform occurs only through published APIs. A company may cache platform data but never becomes its source of truth.

6. Open Questions This Tier Introduces

  • Does Legend Studios need its own LS-tier platform at all going forward, or does introducing CHG-SPEC-001 mean LS-SPEC-002/003/004 (Community, Content, Studio Operations) should also eventually generalize to the CHG tier, leaving Legend Studios with only game-specific DL-SPEC concerns? This document does not answer that — it is flagged as the natural next question once CHG-SPEC-001 is in use, not resolved preemptively.
  • Founder status, currently defined per-game (DL-SPEC-017 §1.6) and aggregated per-game (DL-SPEC-019 §1.6), may need to mean something at the CHG tier instead (a Cobalt Horizon Group founder, recognized across every company) rather than a Diamond Legend-only concept. Not resolved here — a product decision, not an inferred one.